[PragmaticPulp]

> When I read things like this, it makes me not want to have children. From friends, it doesn’t sound like your experience is much different.

If you're seriously considering the question, you owe it to yourself to seek out parents who specifically enjoy and thrive with parenting.

There's a serious imbalance in conversation about children. Most of the internet comments you read about raising children will sound negative or burdensome. Why is that? It's because they're venting, or wanting to discuss a challenging situation.

Meanwhile, you're likely surrounded by countless parents who simply don't talk about their experience. No one wants to hear endless "I love my children" stories, so we just keep quiet. As you get older, you also realize that many people want children but struggle to conceive, so we refrain from child talk around non-parents out of caution and sensitivity.

Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.

It also helps to keep in mind that the infant and toddler phases are relatively short. It's only 4 years, relative to your expected lifespan of around 80 years. If you're in your early 20s and just barely out of college, spending 4 years raising a child past the toddler age probably feels like an eternity. When you're in your late 30s and 40s, you realize that it's merely a blip on the radar. 5% of your life.

Look at this way: If you walked into an Ivy League university library around finals time and started asking sleep deprived students cramming for tests if they're enjoying their decision to enroll, you wouldn't get an accurate picture of the lifelong benefits of an Ivy League degree. Ask them if it was worth it in their 40s or 50s and you'll get a very different answer. Asking parents in the middle of the most difficult few childraising years if a lifetime of child raising makes sense isn't going to give you an accurate picture, either.

> I’m sure you’re biased and it’s culturally unacceptable (to say the least) to say that you’d rather not have had kids, but I wonder how often you think about that loss of individuality?

It's actually an extremely common question from my non-parent friends. I was afraid of it myself before having kids. The truth is that your old self doesn't disappear when you have kids. Free time still exists. Time management and efficiency becomes vastly more important. When I first had kids, it would take me hours to handle feeding, bathing, prepping for bed, and so on. We made a deliberate effort to streamline our workflows and now we can get it all done quickly and get on with having fun. Believe it or not, dinner time and bath time can actually be fun.

If you approach everything as a miserable chore that you have to slog through before you can get back to wasting time on the internet, you're going to have a bad time. If you lean into it and make an effort to make things fun, it's way better than messing around online.

And don't forget that after a few years they feed and bathe themselves. After 18 years they're off to college and you're back to you. People seem to forget that children grow up quickly.

Frankly, having kids helped me improve some aspects of my individuality and social life. I'm more likely to take the kids for a hike or schedule a meetup with fellow parents. I meet new friends through community functions. And this won't make sense to non-parents, but I actually enjoy spending time my kids.

[smallnamespace]

> Chances are good that the majority of parents in your community, office, or social circle are actually very happy most of the time. There's just not much to talk about because being happy with your family is the boring, normal state.

Slightly off-topic, but this isn't limited to parenting feedback, it's true of nearly any topic online.

Some forums are full of people venting, some forums are full of people showing off how great their lives are.

It's very difficult to get an accurate view of an average person's experience with X (and maybe it's not even relevant to you—what you really want is a picture of your experience with X, which may depend a lot on your socioeconomic circumstances).

I've found anecdotes from friends to significantly outperform online anecdotes in predicting my personal experience.

[PragmaticPulp]

Very true. Even worse, there's a significant selection bias that occurs where people pre-filter for opinions that match their pre-conceived notions.

On the topic of children, someone can spend their entire life around coworkers, extended family, and friends who are happy parents without thinking twice about it. Yet as soon as they read some comments online about someone struggling with their children, they have an "I knew it!" reaction.

As a parent, I don't try to push other people to have children. I do, however, roll my eyes at how out of touch the anti-child rhetoric on the internet has become. It's almost as if young people are convinced that all parents are actually secretly miserable but we're all collectively lying about enjoying it out of a sense of societal obligation.

[balfirevic]

> I do, however, roll my eyes at how out of touch the anti-child rhetoric on the internet has become.

I guess it depends where you look, but here on HN comments seem to lean towards being pro-children - which makes sense, since most people want them and have them.

The most interesting kind of comments, to me, are the ones that try to convey how having kids is great and worth it, and yet - upon reading them - all I can think of is "wow, that sounds horrible". There is one example that is kind of like that in this thread [0].

I know it's because it's much easier to convey in words how annoying or boring something is compared to how it brings this deep, unspeakable (and perhaps, for some readers, yet unexperienced) joy. It's still a bit funny.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271156